While the previous Christopher B. Landon film didn’t really play to his strengths, it really says something about strong those strengths are when two other films came out that within the same ballpark… and yet Landon had nothing to do with them. With how close we are to the end of the year, it’s unlikely that we’ll get to It’s A Wonderful Knife, but we are going to get into this film, which takes the Back To The Future inspiration from the Happy Death Day films and pushes them even further.
The performances are… I mean, they do what they’re supposed to do, but they rub against my innate disdain for Valley Girl-isms, which accounts for the bulk of the people that Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) goes back in time to save, including her own mother (Olivia Holt, with Julie Bowen as the adult her).
To a degree, I get why the character dynamics are this way: It’s playing on the parent/child role reversal that the first Back To The Future did, where the kid has to be the responsible one and the parent is the wild child. However, when that dynamic is expanded to basically everyone in the ‘Mollys’ group, along with their boyfriends, it gets annoying real fast. I could maybe excuse it as a bit of meta-text, since ‘80s slasher films usually had babysitters in the lead role, and watching Jamie try and keep everyone safe does indeed feel like watching someone babysitting a group of rowdy brats. However, since that experience also felt like pulling teeth just watching these people act like the very slasher clichés I don’t like, it’s just tiring. That every other bit of plot convenience, usually involving Jamie getting access to something or someone, is an afterthought as a joke about how not-protective the ‘80s were… yeah, it just sticks out even more.
But I’m willing to concede on that point, though. I can easily see that level of self-aware idiocy being amusing for others, even if it isn’t my cup of tea. Especially since basically everything else about this, I actually quite liked. Even with how irritating the people around her can be, Shipka’s performance is solid, albeit occasionally held back by the script being a little too on-the-nose about how non-PC the ‘80s were. I also like how the time travel in general is handled, toying around with the very tropes that the Back To The Future trilogy made popular and adjusting them where appropriate. This winds up having a better understanding of temporal causality and the whole ‘if my parents don’t get together, I will cease to exist’ thing than most time travel movies in recent years.
The presentation is pretty damn good too. The design for the slasher killer, namely that mask, is one of the cooler ones I’ve seen in a minute; very Billy Idol by way of The Purge. The individual set pieces are well-paced, and some of them have some real creativity to them, like the tense encounter in a Gravitron, and what is easily the single greatest haunted house I have ever seen with the Dollhouse Of Horrors. Like… the whole aesthetic, using creepy-arse dolls along with actual people dressed up as dolls for plot-related reasons, is amazing and I so badly want one of these in my area next Halloween. Also, “No one’s ever gonna know about you because you are going to die in my time machine” is one of the hardest lines of dialogue of any film this year.
While I admit that this didn’t work for me as much as I wanted it to, as a few too many characters land on the wrong side of annoying for me, this is still a fun remix slasher. If Back To The Future crossed with Mean Girls, but as a bloody slasher movie, sounds like a good time to you, then chances are it will be.
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